'Cinderella', I Wish!

'Cinderella', I Wish! is a powerful and very compelling true life story from Dominique Deveraux's ife.

As a young black child she was living a very enjoyable life with her white foster parents who loved and adored her.

But then disaster strikes, as Nanny dies and she has to be removed from the home where she knew only love and she enters a new world of heartache and troubles.

She is placed into a new home, but rather than love and compassion she is subjected to abuse and misery.

Her life dissolves into one of trauma and fear. She is subjected to abuse, suffers domestic violence and even witnesses murder.

Can Dominique learn to be her own true self, again? Can she find love in her own heart for not only others but also for her own self, too?

Can she deal with people who lie to get what they want, use violence and threats to control those they pretend to love?

There's a lot for her to contend with, an unexpected but welcome pregnancy, the problems of living with ME and the career changes this creeping, vile disease can bring about (REVIEWER'S NOTE: I have personal experience of this little understood but potentially devastating health complaint)  and a variety of other issues that seem to prove the old adage that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

It's an amazing memoir and from an almost little orphan girl without a glass slipper or a prince to an agony aunt and a key manager for 30 years in Children's Social Care Management, I think that Dominique did very well indeed with her life. Just proves that nobody needs a glass slipper, after all!

The book is published by Matador at £9.99.

How to Become a Football Agent: The Guide

This is the second edition of How to Become a Football Agent: The Guide, is written bu Dr Erkut Sogut LL.M, Jack Pentol-Levy and Charlie Pentol-Levy.

The three experts behind behind Football Agent Education have brought all of their experience and their network to put together a guide of critical information that every football agent must know in order to ave any measure of success for his or her clients and themselves.

There are unique insights, detailed information and hints and tips on how to be a successful football agent that you just will not find anywhere else.

It's built on their highly successful first book and now contains expanded chapters, more practical guidance and examples.

There's a highly informative forward by footballing ace legend Robert Pires, plus insightful comments and advice from top working agents who represent the top flights of elite footballers, too.

It now includes the valued opinions of four members on FIFA's select football agent commission. There are also real examples of contracts and a number of relevant case studies for readers to learn from.

The authors are very clear about the role of the modern agent. Long gone are the days when the agent just turned up, got the contract signed aand went away again to repeat the same performance next season. Now a successful and motivated agent must take active steps to work with their clients all year round, building their client into a top international brand and encouraging them to make the most of their potential as an international athlete.

If you are a footballer, the parent of a young footballer, an agent or a manager of a football team, this is a book that you must have a copy of.

It's published by Matador on 28th July at £13.99.

Mama's Got a Brand New Bag

Mama's Got a Brand New Bag is the debut novel of Hope Lovejoy.

It tells the story of Mama and her brand new bag. It's a stoma bag. She required a stoma bag because a surgeon, who was tasked with the simple job of removing a polyp from her intestines made a catastrophic blunder that caused the rupture of her colon.

So now, after a different and perhaps more competent, surgeon has cleaned her insides up and repaired the damage and inserted a coma, Aki is facing life with a stoma.

It gurgles, it grumbles and causes Aki no end of concerns common to most stoma patients. What if it bursts when I am out? What of the dreadful fuggy smell it gives off? What if I roll over in the night and squash it, causing it to burst? And if this happens at 3am, the clean up crew (husband and wife) have to spring into action.

Although the novel is written in a way that is intended to amuse, it does so in a way that does not take away the dignity of the protagonist, Aki who is Japanese, or her husband, Peter, who is English.

The novel takes  jaundiced look at surgeons who do not make mistakes and who try to blame everyone else  when things go wrong.

If you have a brand new bag, you might find comfort in this highly original and thought provoking book.

It's published by Matador at £9.99

Against the Odds

Against the Odds is subtitled: Elizabeth Studdert, a life in carving. It tells the fascinating life story of Elizabeth Studdert who is  truly original sculptor.

You might not have heard of Elizabeth Studdert I certainly hadn't, but this book, by her sister, author and journalist, Caroline Studdert, sets out to correct this bewildering paradox, a sculptor who is both highly gifted yet, relatively unknowing.

The story of Elizabeth Studdert, from the slightly "regal" Waterford aristocratic society (the family were not actually viewed as fitting in, being 'outsiders') to her marriage to a Roman Catholic which was considered by some as less than suitable, the complications that an Anglo-Irish heritage could bring, to the financial problems that she faced and the problematic relationship with her mother, the book looks at the various difficulties that Elizabeth overcame in order to be what she wanted to be, a sculptor.

The examples of Elizabeth's works in a variety of materials from soapstone to alabaster, to wood, metal and resins are truly remarkable. And they are from sizes tiny to titanic, one might say.

They show a fluidity in style and form that means each piece of art is imbued with its own living soul, raw emotions radiate from every piece.

Some of the sculptures the viewer might want to become, some of the sculptures the viewer may very well feel they already are.

I'd love to own a piece of art from Elizabeth Studdert. The next best thing, however,is a copy of this hardback book from Matador, at a very reasonable £15.00.

You can learn more about Elizabeth by visiting her website, here:- http://www.elizabethstuddert.co.uk/index.html

Courtier in the Royal House of Stuart

Courtier in the Royal House of Stuart this is an exciting historical novel from Leslie Hatton

It tells the story of an orphan boy called Toby Bennet who survives life in the back streets of the Black Friars area of London.

At the age of ten Toby saved the life of the Prince of Wales who was under attack from a maniac with a knife.

The Prince decides that he will reward Toby by bringing him into the royal household. The Prince arranges his education and promises the life of a courtier within the royal household. The House of Stuart.

But Oliver Cromwell has come to prominence and has wrought terrible destruction and caused terrible chaos the length and breadth of the kingdom.

When the king is taken prisoner and put on trial for treason, the prince must flee for his life, abandoning his country.

He spends the next twelve years exiled with his mother or his sister whom is Princess Mary of Orange either in Paris or Holland.

And all the while, loyal Toby is with him. There is romance for Toby, with a young lady's-in-waiting for Princess Mary

But there are several attempts to bring about the premature death of Toby and Toby learns that he is being pursued by a ruthless and secret adversary, someone who holds a dreadful secret and who wishes to see Toby dead.

But who is this person? And what is the secret that they hold?

It's a riproaring historical thriller from The Book Guild at £9.99.

The Madness Locker

The Madness Locker is a debut novel from the pen of E. J. Russell.

It's Christmas Day, 1986 and a corpse has been discovered in a wheelie bin in the Eastern suburbs of Sydney, Australia.

The remains are those of a widow who was 70 years of age.

The police swiftly go into action and launch a detailed and very intensive investigation, but despite their very best efforts, they fail to identify any potential suspects or a potential motive for the killing.

They find no clues, no forensic evidence and so reluctantly the police decide to file it as a cold case.

However, perhaps the police wee looking in the wrong places for clues to the murder?

E. J. Russell looks back to a time when, fifty years previously, the whole world had been in flames as innocent people were sent to places like Auschwitz merely because the Nazi Third Reich either did not like their political vies, their mental incapacity, their race or just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A young girl is arrested along with her family, they are forced to travel to Auschwitz on a three-day journey in a railway wagon. On arrival she is separated from her parents who she never sees again.

After years of suffering forced hard labour, near starvation and punishments "just because" the Russian army sweeps into Poland and she, along with the other pitiful survivors of Auschwitz are liberated.

After she recovers she believes that she knows who she blames for the loss of her parents and the years of abuse she suffered at the hands of her tormentors.

She sets out on a journey to track them down and to bring them to some form of justice.

Is there a link between her search for retributive justice and the corpse that was found in the wheelie bin?

If so, how did her nemesis track her down? And how and why did she have to die? How was she killed?

The beginning of this fictionalised account is a real event that took place in 2006 when a corpse was discovered in similar circumstances to those described in this novel.

It's a compelling and exciting thriller and worth every penny of the £9.99 price set by the publisher, Matador.

It will make a very good beach companion for the holidaymaking reader.

Memories of Now

Memories of Now is set in the wintertime. 

Seven old university friends have gathered together in a country hotel in Scotland.

They dine, they drink, they take walks. They reminisce.

They find themselves facing up to a number of issues from their shared and not shared pasts, they debate, they argue and they bicker as only old friends can who share a history of 35 years of lives lived.

Lives lived well and perhaps not quite so well as intended or hoped for.

As the snow falls on the Scottish countryside some of the friends learn truths that they would rather have not known.

They learn with considerable pain that things they thought they had always known as great truths were, all long, really nothing more than, at worst, great lies, or, at the very best, false assumptions or merely misunderstandings. And that what once tasted good now tasted sour.

Tajalli Keshavarz has written a very important book that is melancholic and which shines a strong beam of sunlight into the lives of seven old friends and lovers. And, after all, don't they say that sunlight is the best disinfectant?

 It's published by Matador at £10.00 and will be available from 28th July.